Hometown Oneonta - The Otesgo-Delaware Dispatch: The Plains At Parish Homestead

The Plains At Parish Homestead

Friday, December 12, 2008

When The Kids Leave Home,
Now There’s An Option

By LAURA COX

When the children leave, that four-bedroom home, once bustling with the energy, can seem too still and vacant. The neighbors, once best friends, have come and gone as well.
Which can get couples thinking about moving into a smaller home or apartment – perhaps with all the amenities provided, with common rooms for socializing or card playing, and a beauty salon right around the corner.
Something like, say, The Plains at Parish Homestead, Otsego County’s first 55-plus active-adult community – it’s at Routes 7 and 205 on Oneonta’s west end – which earlier this month welcomed its first residents.
Appropriately, they were Gordon B. Roberts, the retired insurance man, community leader and long-time advocate of such a facility, and his wife Alyce.
The Plains is the only community around here where one can “age in place,” according to Barbara Ann Heegan, its director of marketing.
The main building at The Plains – scheduled to be completed late next summer – will include 64 independent apartments, 43 assisted living and “memory care” apartments, as well as a beauty salon, a café, country store, business center, library and a wellness and fitness center.
The 31-acre property will also include 39 patio homes, built in groups of three, and a community garden.
Walking into the Robertses brand new house, they had already made it home after only five days. The wallpaper was the same as the five-bedroom home they left behind on Glen Avenue. There was a fire in the fireplace. And many paintings by Alyce leaned against the walls ready to be hung.
Alyce, 89, did needlepoint in the family room as Gordie, 84, conducted a tour.
The master suite is large and comfortably fit multiple dressers in addition to the bed and side tables. The walkway to the bathroom has his and hers closets; the bathroom is sizeable.
The center of the home – the family room – features a stone-mantle fireplace with cathedral ceilings, a dining area and a large kitchen. A patio door leads out to a concrete patio, which Roberts said the couple is still deciding whether to enclose – he is waiting to see what it looks like after the landscaping and construction of other homes behind his are done.
A second bedroom is off the dining area with a bathroom adjacent. The Roberts took advantage of the option for a bonus room on a small second level, where Gordie has his office space, plus a pull-out couch for when family comes to visit.
Under the staircase is a large storage space, where Gordie keeps his large assortment of ties.
Lastly, Gordie opened the door to his two-car garage, half filled with boxes yet to be unpacked, and a wall filled with Alyce’s stuffed-bear collection.
The pricing for a patio home in 2008 is $174,900 - $189,900.
A long-time resident of Oneonta, Gordie Roberts is greatly responsible for the creation of the active adult community.

“Gordie Roberts was the first to get the ideas flowing,” said Heegan
The idea goes back to 1972, Roberts said, when a friend – close to death – handed him a check for a large sum of money. She told him she wanted it to go towards the development of a retirement community in Oneonta.
Roberts spent the next 30 years trying to gather support for the development and find a location. After meeting much resistance, the funding from his friend ended up going to a development in Norwich.
In the early 1990s Milly Parish, the sixth generation to live on the Parish Homestead, joined Gordie in discussion about the development. She was living alone on the 31 acres and realized she couldn’t manage it alone anymore. So she offered up the land for the development, as long as she could continue to live in her home at the front of the property.
After facing more roadblocks, Parish and Roberts finally connected with Christa Construction & Living Communities LLC. The groundbreaking for The Plains at Parish Homestead came in November 2007, a dream come true.
“You have no idea what it is like to have a place like this, where you live by all people your age and you can do activities like playing cards any time,” said Roberts, who visited many active-adult communities in New York, Florida, Maine and North Carolina leading up to the development of The Plains.

When The Plains at Parish Homestead is complete, more than 100 housing units will have risen on a hillside on Oneonta’s west side. In this map of the active-adult project, Route 7 is to the right of the image; Route 205 is to the north. The main building – apartments, the country store, the dining areas, salons, fitness and wellness center – is at left. The other buildings are the triplex patio homes.

Labels: 12-12-08, Barbara Ann Heegan, Gordon B. Roberts, Plains at Parish Homestead, The City of the Hills

posted by The Freeman's Journal @ 8:36 AM

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